Mitt: Mendacious To The End

"If this were only about me, I would go on.

Said with a straight face, Mitt Romney uttered those words to the Conservative Political Action Committee earlier this week as he quit the 2008 Presidential race.

It's about more than Mitt? Hardly. It is never, has never, could never be about more than Mitt. This is the most self-important, self-directed, and the in the end, self-deluded candidate in modern times. There is no room for it to have been about more than Mitt. Like what, there was some higher, loftier purpose in Romney's running for President? Please. But leave it to this Herculean heaver of hefty bullshit to make it sound that way.

"I feel I must now stand aside, for our party and our country," Romney further piously whined. He had to stand aside for the simple reason that his campaign was a failure, and was going nowhere. Hey, no shame in that. Romney is hardly the first Presidential hopeful to go down in the primaries. Plenty of them--Biden, Dodd, Richardson, Thompson, Giulliani--have dropped out just since January.

And not one of them felt compelled to make their withdrawal seem like some kind of grand gesture of sacrifice and selfless patriotism.

As usual, spinning like a top while standing still, he morphed into Mitt 37.0 (and counting): reluctant Republican warrior, falling on his sword for the good of his party, even though he personally was prepared to bravely soldier on.
In truth, the only reason Romney could even entertain remaining in the race was because he was largely bankrolling it personally by this point. So much for the selfless warrior narrative. But then, Romney has never let the truth interfere with a good line of bullshit he was putting down.

But what separated Romney's remarks from mere (and more) vapid pandering
to something more repugnant still, was this:
"In this time of war, I simply cannot let my campaign be a part of aiding a surrender to terror."

This from a man who suggested that his five strapping boys were doing the equivalent of military service by criss-crossing Iowa in a luxury bus and posting silly campaign jokes on their white bread website.

The only thing America refused to surrender to was a phony flim-flam man named Mitt Romney. Now that, would have been truly terrifying.